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Students should have right to designate how activity fees are spent

Posted: Tuesday, April 06, 1999

As we've seen time and again with organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, governments and their subdivisions take on a troublesome task when they venture far afield from their fundamental roles.

With a strong tradition of independence and self-reliance, many Americans subscribe to the belief that the less government there is, the better. Bureaucracy, they contend, is a necessary evil to be tolerated as long as it meets basic needs such as national defense, upholding a system of common currency and a few other specified functions.

Unfortunately, we've strayed far beyond the basics with government getting involved in everything from deciding what is art to purchasing prophylactics for promiscuous teen-agers.

It is not uncommon for citizens to protest these attempts by government to be all things to all people. Often differences of opinion on the proper role of government result in civil litigation.

That happened in Wisconsin a few years ago when a group of law students disagreed with the way the University of Wisconsin was allocating student activity fees.

When the university rejected their requests to have a hand in deciding how their money was being spent, the students sued. A federal trial judge and an appeals court sided with the students.

The jurists held that the mandatory fees forced some students to underwrite views that they found objectionable. The University of Wisconsin was ordered to stop collecting fees from students who protested specific allocations.

The court said that ``the forced funding of such organizations significantly adds to the burdening of the students' free-speech rights,'' adding that, the university ``cannot use the allocable portion of objecting students' mandatory activity fees to fund (those) organizations.''

While not absolving dissenting students from paying any activity fees, the ruling did afford them the privilege of checking off organizations they don't want to support and having their fees reduced on a prorated basis.

Unwilling to accept the lower courts' ruling, the University of Wisconsin appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week agreed to review the case and issue a ruling at a later date.

Obviously, the Supreme Court's decision will be of interest here in Athens where University of Georgia students will pay a little more than $2 million in student activity fees this year, not counting their athletic, health, transportation and Ramsey Student Center levies.

And, as they've done at Wisconsin and on other campuses, students here have lobbied - unsuccessfully - for the right to withhold a portion of their activity fees that go to subsidize groups pursuing political and ideological goals.

Among the groups objected to in the 1996 Wisconsin lawsuit were Students of National Organization for Women, International Socialist Organization, Campus Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Center and an AIDS support network.

One of the big problems with subsidizing diverse organizations, as it is with the artists and the NEA, is deciding who gets the money.

The tendency among some campuses is to support groups often identified as liberal or left wing, while turning a deaf ear to pleas from fundamental or right-wing organizations.

After the University of Virginia refused to subsidize a student-run Christian magazine several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that public universities and colleges cannot first create a ``public forum'' for students and then withhold funding to some groups because of their viewpoint.

Based on those and other federal court rulings and federal precedent, there is a good chance the Supreme Court will uphold the lower courts in the Wisconsin case.

The courts have held, for example that union members can be forced to pay dues to support political campaigns and other activities unrelated to collective bargaining. And for years, federal employees have been allowed to specify that their donations to the combined federal campaign, the equivalent of the United Way, not go to any organization they find objectionable.

If the nation's universities insist on serving as funding conduits for organizations with ideological, political or social agendas, then the courts should give students a bigger voice in how their money is spent.